We can't run away when there's free speech to protect, says biz's top lawyer

Analysis Cloudflare found itself underfire this month for seemingly allowing officially designated foreign terrorists to use its website protection services. Which, under US law, would be a big no-no.…

It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2018 edition of our annual Charity Drive.

Every year since 2007, we've been actively encouraging readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our annual charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it (ethically), and we don't want it clogging up our offices anyway. It's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have nearly 20 prizes amounting to nearly $5,000 in value, including game consoles, computer accessories, collectibles, smartwatches, and more. In 2017, Ars readers raised over $36,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $280,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers really dig deep.

On Tuesday evening, the New York Timesrevealed more startling news about Facebook: the company "gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules.”

The news comes days after Facebook disclosed a massive photo bug, weeks after 50 million people were affected by an access-token harvesting attack, and less than a month after it was revealed that Facebook considered selling access to its users’ data. All of those scandals are on top of the Cambridge Analytica debacle. In June 2018, Facebook dodged some lawmakers' questions in written testimony, after two days of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the US Senate.

The newspaper cited "hundreds of pages" of internal documents, which it did not publish.

HAWTHORNE, CALIF.—On a breezy Tuesday evening across the busy street from SpaceX's headquarters, Elon Musk's Boring Company invited a group of journalists to take a ride through the company's first test tunnel. The test tunnel stretches 1.14 miles from SpaceX's former parking lot, under Crenshaw Boulevard, under the SpaceX campus, and finally terminating behind some nondescript warehouses in Hawthorne, at Prairie St. and 120th St.

The ride was hardly a finished product; judging the success of The Boring Company's tunnel-digging vision would be impossible at this point. What today's demo did, though, was offer a proof-of-concept.